It seems like just last month that producers at Blizzard were worrying publicly that EA's Star Wars: The Old Republic was partially to blame for World of Warcraft's declining subscriber numbers. But now there's reason to believe The Old Republic itself is already seeing its own decline in subscribers, only months after its launch late last year.

In an investor note released today, Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz said he suspects that subscription levels for The Old Republic may already be lower than the 1.7 million EA reported in February. Creutz's primary piece of evidence for this belief is publicly available server population numbers assembled and reported by TORstatus.net. These figures have shown a roughly 10 percent decline over the last two months. That doesn't necessarily mean the game has lost 10 percent of its subscribers in that time, of course, but it isn't really a sign of strong player growth, either.

In addition, Creutz notes what he terms "aggressive" EA promotions to offer free game time to some long-standing players. He cites anecdotal evidence from blogs and message boards where players report spending less time in the game. Creutz suggests that the relative paucity of end game content "appears[s] to be taking its toll" on player interest, and that EA's efforts to address these concerns "appear to have stalled." (EA did not immediately respond to a request for comment).

Cowen and Company now officially predicts that The Old Republic will see an average of 1.25 million subscribers throughout the fiscal year ending next March. That's not horrible, by any means. It's likely enough to keep the game profitable and operating well into the future. But it's well below the analyst's previous estimates of a 2 million subscriber average for the year, not to mention World of Warcraft's 10.3 million subscribers as of last November.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Definitely some player drop off, though starter planet populations make it seem worse (average 100 chars during December, more like 20 now). Now that I ran one char to 50 doing only missions (all including side missions on all planets), I'm happy to class mission/PvP level the rest of my chars while waiting for rated warzones and perhaps some form of arena.

My guild is still growing; 400 ppl total, ~20 on at any time. Always someone around for whatever. And the 1.2 update fixed all my issues with the game client (the stuttering UI that was much worse on Linux than XP).

No desire to go back to WoW, regardless of how often they offer me free time and auto-lvl'd chars.

Almost all of my friends who swapped over to TOR have become fairly bored with it and have been filling time with other interests; having a ton more Diablo 3 and Mists of Pandaria beta invites out there certainly isn't helping, but a majority of them say they're just bored with the game. None cited any hatred or distrust for EA, at least not enough to stop them from subbing in TOR, but all of them are letting their subs lapse.

Doesn't help that Diablo 3 is coming out in a few weeks, anyways, hard to fight subscription bleed against that.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Diablo 3 is probably an equal concern for all 3 games.

Blizzard is positively shaking in their boots about D3 ...

Honestly I'm very confused as to why anyone is still playing Wow - it seems pointless to me.

I get the impression that we hit peak MMO 5 years ago. Since then, millions of MMO subscribers have reclaimed their lives and moved back to less demanding forms of entertainment, while developers compete to hold the attention of a hard core of MMO fans for a few months at a time before they go back to an old favourite MMO or the new hopeful.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Diablo 3 is probably an equal concern for all 3 games.

Blizzard is positively shaking in their boots about D3 ...

Honestly I'm very confused as to why anyone is still playing Wow - it seems pointless to me.

I really don't know why they would be worried about D3 Don't they own it?

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Diablo 3 is probably an equal concern for all 3 games.

Blizzard is positively shaking in their boots about D3 ...

Honestly I'm very confused as to why anyone is still playing Wow - it seems pointless to me.

lol, just because it is from the same company doesn't mean that you want to cannibalize your other products subscription base.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Diablo 3 is probably an equal concern for all 3 games.

Blizzard is positively shaking in their boots about D3 ...

Honestly I'm very confused as to why anyone is still playing Wow - it seems pointless to me.

lol, just because it is from the same company doesn't mean that you want to cannibalize your other products subscription base.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Diablo 3 is probably an equal concern for all 3 games.

Blizzard is positively shaking in their boots about D3 ...

Honestly I'm very confused as to why anyone is still playing Wow - it seems pointless to me.

I really don't know why they would be worried about D3 Don't they own it?

SWTOR is a fun idea but the execution is lacking on all levels. It is playing catch up on features and systems players of the MMO genre have come to expect. It's also hard on a lot of peoples rigs. Customer service is also pretty shoddy a lot of times. All of this I believe has hurt the games reputation and subscriber numbers.

The dev team has some good ideas, but I worry that they will be able to get them released quickly enough to appease the player base.

I'm not bothered with the EA thing, although I've heard rumours of rather unsavoury business practices. I just got bored of swtor because the experience is glitchy and therefore unrewarding. The game jerks & stutters as you run around, and there are very frequent delays when triggering abilities. It just seemed that the required effort hadn't been put into the core gameplay experience. When you have a competitor like WoW, you can't afford to make schoolboy errors like this.

Friends of mine who play it complain about the complete lack of people playing. There may still be 1.7M subscribed, but they sure aren't logging in. I enjoyed the beta well enough, but there is no Mac client (my wife and I had to play it on the PC she still used at the time) so we aren't playing. It doesn't help that Bioware claims everything makes a difference, but the only difference in most quests is which 2 lines of banter from a chosen action take place. Do the same quest w/2 different characters (plenty of overlap for say, Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter) and then make sure to pick a different answer. You say something different, and so do they, then right back into the script w/no real change in outcome. It's meaningless.

Diablo 3 is the only upcoming game on my radar really and I did accept a recent scroll of resurrection from a friend in WoW, but that was just to auto-level my Worgen Druid from 33 to 80.. I paid a month so my friend could get the special mount, then I dropped the sub again.

I stopped playing a while ago, mostly because after the initial surge of players leveling new characters most areas in the game feel very empty. It is near impossible to form pickup-up groups to do the group quests (at least on the server I was on). From what I have read it sounds like most servers are very underpopulated. Unfortunately this is a self re-inforcing problem and unless they figure out how to better manage server population (perhaps merging some server) no amount of new content is going help keep the game form feeling empty. If I'm only going to get a single player experience there are other games I can play. It is unfortunate because the game itself is very fun and well designed, I think they did make some real improvements to the MMO formula.

I am going to have to agree with famousringo here. I think the MMO consumer is growing up and realizing the amount of time that will have to go into bringing a character up to their level of expectation and going "ugh".

Unless the game really challenges the gamer with something new I expect a lot of people will sink into a miasma of "I could be doing something else game wise" or going back to characters they have invested so much time in, they can't just throw them away.

I did the SWTOR dance for a while. I liked the stories but honestly, I topped out a few characters and found myself asking why should I go do another one when inevitably I will look like the next guy in the same class by endgame. Of course, I can't put in the hours I used too because R/L intervenes but even starting it up again I say "This or maybe a few quests in Skyrim or a few rounds of Starcraft"...MMO's lose out simply because I feel running them all day seems to be a waste.

Well if Blizzard was worried about SWTOR, they might be really worried when GW2 comes out....lot's of chatter about it, and having lot's of experience with Anet as a development company, I really don't expect them to disappoint in all they have said about the game.

Diablo 3 is probably an equal concern for all 3 games.

Blizzard is positively shaking in their boots about D3 ...

Honestly I'm very confused as to why anyone is still playing Wow - it seems pointless to me.

lol, just because it is from the same company doesn't mean that you want to cannibalize your other products subscription base.

Ehh, in this market sales don't necessarily equal cannibalization. Especially considering the WoW/D3 dual access pass (pay for a year of WoW get D3 for free) Blizzard is clearly hoping to utilize the loyal WoW subscriber base to generate extra sales and interest for D3. The writing is on the wall anyway - WoW is headed for the long slow decline. There's still life in the game for years to come, but "Peak-WoW" has come and gone. Rather than letting those players that are considering leaving get picked off by some other company's IP - keep them in the fold by offering them a new (a highly addictive) experience. Makes perfect sense to me.

As someone who has played since the first minutes of early access and continues to be an active player, I can confirm that these analysts are spot on. Players are leaving, and not without reason. SWTOR is an MMO that is biased towards the leveling process. The combat system is pretty good, but there is a distinct lack of polished and unique endgame content. Once you hit 50, you're going to run out of things to do in a hurry.

Ironically, even though SWTOR is biased towards leveling, the actual single-player leveling experience is quite bad compared to other single-player RPGs. In a sense, SWTOR is a co-op single-player RPG, but a very crude one compared to BioWare's other games. It's also far buggier than anything else BioWare has ever released.

Retention is going to be a serious issue, as is attracting new players. Honestly, I think that SWTOR has already peaked in subscribers. Active players will continue to fall off, stablizing around 1 million subscribers for the next year or so. Maybe they will snag a few hundred thousand more subscribers if BioWare pulls a major rabbit out of their hat for their first major expansion, but I just don't see it happening.

Honestly, this makes me very sad. I was looking forward to this game for a long time, and I still enjoy playing it. I just don't enjoy it as much as I was hoping, and I don't see myself continuing to enjoy it for a significant period of time.

Eh, Gabe's overstating the issue. In TOR, each character class has its own story. The story is broken up into chapters. The 'return to fleet for R&R' thing is a (admittedly sloppy) way to mark the transition between chapters. It's a "Hey, you just finished a significant piece of the story, why not return to the fleet, sell some stuff, craft some stuff, and focus on other things before getting back to the grind?" mechanic. It's definitely not something that comes up often.

Otherwise, it's the same kind of time waster every other MMO is. Less, in some cases (the crafting interface is awesome. Set it and forget it).

Born in the early 70's I grew up on Star Wars. Figures and ships adorn my home office walls. I've read most of the earlier books, played every Lucas Arts Star Wars games. In short I'm their target demographic. After playing in the open beta I cancelled my pre-order and skipped it entirely. Two years of WoW really burnt me out on the whole MMO genre.

I get the impression that we hit peak MMO 5 years ago. Since then, millions of MMO subscribers have reclaimed their lives and moved back to less demanding forms of entertainment, while developers compete to hold the attention of a hard core of MMO fans for a few months at a time before they go back to an old favourite MMO or the new hopeful.

I tend to agree as well. I've quit the genre altogether. No matter how much you try to casual it up, the MMORPG space still requires that you either A) play solo, in which case, why bother with a subscription-based game at all, or B) put in a lot of time. Even if you're not hardcore, you still have to get online, find some friends, see if they want to do whatever quest / area / etc. you're on, get to the same place, get geared, get ready, and then play. By that time, I could have already picked up and played some other game to my fill. MMORPGs are inherently work-filled time sinks.

Personally, I'm sort of over the genre. It all starts to feel very much the same after awhile, anyway, whether it's ToR or WoW or whatever. My friends that played ToR just let their subscriptions lapse. I don't think anyone was really angry at the game or EA or anything, they just finished playing as much as they wanted to play. It stopped being interesting. I think it's too much of a retread of WoW, really.

The initial thing that drew me to TOR was the friends who were playing it, I tried it out and figured I could get $60 worth of game play in the first free month of subscription.

I liked the combat system and there are definitely some good ideas present in the game, but the environment and game enginer are both horrible. I feel like if this game had been build on WoW's engine and been mapped ell it would be a grand slam. But as it is the world feels empty and dead, not because of lack of players, but because of lack of ambiance.

I haven't reached level 50 but I feel like I've seen everything I need to in the game. People more into star wars might get more out of the game by seeing other planets and playing through the different class stories, but as an impartial gamer the game its self doesn't hold me despite some very good ideas.

My little brother said he wished for a game where you could literally do anything. I thought to myself "That is life".

People are so held back by their fears and anxieties (or laziness).

I often leave the house to go outdoors to hike, bicycle, or some such other activity and wonder just where everyone else is... surrounded by thousands of people yet I see only a few dozen at most in any of the outdoor areas where I live.

Seems like there's usually a "king" in MMORPG's that gets competition from other games...but gets people always coming back to it.

Back in the day, that game was Everquest. It was the king. There were several games that sprang up to try to lure people away....Camelot, Asheron's Call 1&2, Star Wars Galaxies, Anarchy Online etc etc. But people didn't seem to stay long at those games (oh sure, they had a following to be sure and some were great). Everquest didn't really see big competition until World of Warcraft was released.

When WoW first came out, it's main goal was to be the anti-Everquest. It wanted to be fun! Stop with the long meditation times and other major "down times" when playing. Stop with the extremely long & hard leveling system. Have actual quests that took you form one area to the next. Stop with the fricken grinding. Be able to solo to max level no matter what class you were. I always got a kick when playing WoW in reading the complaints from people saying how much of a grind it can be and how boring it is and this and that. Go play Everquest for a few hours and get back to me about "hard". I played EQ for 5 years and I NEVER got a character to max level. Sure, others did, but I just couldn't. Getting a character to level 85 is nothing in WoW.

So now, WoW seems to still be the king of MMORPG's...for now. Sure, it's numbers are falling as people just grow tired of it or they try out greener pastures. But so far no game has come along and devastated WoW as much as WoW devastated EQ "back in the day".

All MMO's will face this issue. It is the same game with different universes. All have numbered bar buttons, a mini map in a corner, a chat box in a corner, a Quest helper/log, a Map you slowly reveal, levels, trade skills, talents, classes, groups, raids. It's the same game over and over again. SWToR brought a single player 'story' experience to an MMO, but once that is 'over', you are left with the same game.I've been playing MMO's for a very long time and every time I try a 'new' one it is just the same old thing.Games played: EQ, FF:XI, EQ2, AC2, WoW, LotRO, AoC, SW:ToR.

Analysts are useless. Anyone who knows anything about MMOs can tell you subscription numbers will drop from launch, probably until the first expansion, that always happens. The thing that really matters is whether the game is stable or in a freeefall. SWTOR has shown no sign of being in a freefall, and he apparently doesn't think it is either since he estimates 1.25m in a year. In other words, there is no interesting information here, and it's all just basic guesswork anyway.

Please don't report on more analyst bullshit (for any topic) unless they have real numbers to back up their claims. It just lowers the level of discussion, and gives publicity to people who don't deserve any.

I like SWTOR and I'm still playing it; I stopped playing WoW after 5 years a while ago. The biggest problem for SWTOR was the lack of things to draw you in long term. For MMOs that's basically guilds and cooperate grinding, be it raids, pvp, or socializing.

SWTOR's emphasis on story/quests with full voice was probably not the best priority long term. The quests are only engaging the first time around.

There were several elements that were missing to draw people in.

A focus on endgame activities to progress 50s. A lack of tools to nurture interaction and guild formation: no auto looking for group, no server specific forums, and too many servers and instancing.

When I started WoW in 2005 on Kirin Tor the server had an ongoing community. People chatted online and on the server forum about this or that guild. This or that pvp player. With SWTOR, I don't even know which guilds have downed which bosses.

Bioware made some wrong strategic choices. They tried to focus on building a great leveling/questing experience but at the expense of endgame and community focus and tools.

I'll still play it because I enjoy the pvp, and I've gotten to know to certain the pvp community on the server. But if something else comes a long....I already took a break to play ME3. I'm not sure the subscription model is going to work in the current market.

Kyle Orland / Kyle is the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica, specializing in video game hardware and software. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He is based in the Washington, DC area.